If you claim this airdrop, best practice would be to save the key, and then first rotate your github keys before claiming. In this way any potential security risk is averted.
The main goal of the Handshake airdrop was to get developers interested in using Handshake, but one of the sub-goals was to help incentivize good security practices. The airdrop process involves running a script on your private key[1], so you should naturally rotate your key after claiming your coins.
I get that this looks very weird from the perspective of someone who’s been around since the early days of internet mass adoption. ICANN is basically a US-controlled bureaucracy, and bureaucracies are something that we’ve had for a long time and know the pros and cons of. And in fact ICANN has done a remarkably great job of what can only be described as a job from hell—coordinating the interests of a bajillion conflicting parties in one of the worlds most valuable digital assets.
That said, I hope you won’t write this off just because it looks weird. After all, the internet itself looked extremely weird for years (and arguably was at its most fun and interesting during that weird period.)
Handshake solves some real problems with the existing domain root zone system. Perhaps most interestingly to you, it trivially makes certificate pinning decentralized, and relieves us of the need to trust an increasingly obviously untrustworthy set of CAs. Further, it lets people hold domains anonymously, and creates something much more akin to actual ownership than the sort of “at the whim of the crown” perpetual renting that is available under ICANN.
Finally, handshake was designed from the ground up to be maximally compatible with the existing ICANN system. While we’ve identified serious problems with that system, we also have huge respect for it, and are well aware that for the near future Handshake’s usefulness will be very dependent on it being a “yes, and” rather than an “either, or”
Anyway, hopefully you can look past the novelty and weirdness of what we’re proposing and evaluate it substantively—your feedback would be immensely valuable
Sir, with all due respect, we've reached the limits of core internet protocols. The internet is a different beast than it was in the past, and to maximize the experience and capabilities of the internet, we need to look further.
Protocols designed today should not look like protocols designed 40+ years ago, lest we failed to progress.
That being said, at the end of the day, the protocol in Handshake is DNS. Handshake really just takes the torch from ICANN moving forward.
If only we knew about this technology instead of giving control of the root zone to the US. :/
I think this is a good start--some easy modifications could turn it into a 3-color banner similar to the french or mexican flags, which would be both easier to remember and less likely for a scammer to guess correctly. Or you could do randomly generated animals! i.e. "if you don't see a pink bear, you're being phished"
Alternatively just walk those neighborhoods and they won't feel unwalkable very shortly! My 89 year old grandmother used to walk from her house in Japantown to Chrissy Field and back, regularly--your legs get used to it and suddenly the city feels a lot more accessible.
Thanks! Yeah, as it says in the kickstarter, we're going to send update emails at the appropriate times, with links to directly order replacements from us or other vendors.
